For many years, certain industrial activities, such as oil and gas extraction, have increasingly expanded to subsea locations, as the number of available land-based sites has declined. The seafloor, however, is a harsh and inaccessible environment, and many activities, e.g., drilling operations, involve considerable risk of environmental contamination. In some cases, an oil or gas well can be located thousands of feet below the surface of the water where no human can go. As a result, monitoring the safety and efficiency of drilling equipment can be difficult.
For example, in many cases the instruments used to monitor subsea drilling equipment (or other types of equipment) fail more often than the equipment itself. Failure of the monitoring instruments can create false positive warnings of drilling equipment failure, and can necessitate excess maintenance procedures to fix the monitoring system. Furthermore, traditional monitoring instruments are often incorporated into the drilling equipment and, as a result, repairing the instruments can require a costly operation to bring the piece of equipment up from the seafloor. Moreover, even when monitoring instruments are operating correctly, they provide little detail, e.g., allowing operators to determine only whether a major event (e.g., a catastrophic component failure) has occurred.
Prior art systems have attempted to address the above issues, but with little success. For example, acoustic monitoring of subsea equipment has been attempted using sensors mounted remotely from the subsea equipment, but these systems suffer from the same lack of detail discussed above. Accordingly, they provide little value to operators beyond reporting a major event (e.g., a catastrophic component failure).
Given these shortcomings, monitoring instruments for subsea equipment are often considered unreliable and not used. Without any ability to monitor subsea equipment during operation, acceptable safety levels are achieved by building overly robust subsea equipment and implementing conservative maintenance schedules—both of which add considerable cost to subsea operations.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for improved subsea equipment monitoring systems that can provide more detailed monitoring of equipment during operation. In addition, there is a need for such systems to have built-in redundancy and the ability to be serviced separately from the subsea equipment to prevent unnecessary maintenance in the event of monitoring system failure.